[UCP Books]: Segregation: A Global History

“A book of enormous ambition—and accomplishment. Moving between broad patterns and local detail, he has produced a global history of modern coerced racial segregation from its imperial origins to postwar suburbanization. It is a history marked by moral passion, clarity of thought and expression, and extraordinary research on all continents.”

Thomas Bender, author of The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea

SEGREGATION

A Global History

Carl H. Nightingale

Published by Reaktion Books & distributed by the University of Chicago PressPublication date: June 1, 2012

Publication date: June 26, 2012

International publication date: June 26

978-0-226-50874-6

$35.00/£22.50

It started more than 7,000 years ago, in ancient Mesopotamia, when a holy temple was built in the city of Eridu exclusively for the gods—and ordinary mortals were kept out. It continues today, as everything from restrictive zoning to gentrification to white flight continue to divide cities around the world along racial lines. Segregation has always been with us.

Carl Nightingale’s ambitious history takes readers on a sweeping voyage across time and space, from the ancient roots of modern practices, through the long rise of divided cities in the overseas colonies of Western empires, to the twentieth century’s “segregation mania”—which spread racial separation to cities on every continent. Along the way, Nightingale introduces us to the architects and victims of segregation in London, Calcutta, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Paris, Algiers, Baltimore, Berlin, and more, before turning to the two most extreme examples of contemporary segregation—Johannesburg and Chicago.

The civil rights and anti-colonial movements may have weakened segregation, but, Nightingale shows, it’s far from dead, and it continues to damage lives and deform cities worldwide today. Simultaneously a stunning history and a bracing reminder of the work still to be done, Segregation is a work of unparalleled scope and insight.

Carl H. Nightingale isassociate professor of urban and world history in the Department of Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is available for interviews.